Six Senses (And None of Them Common)
by Hinn-Raven
Summary: Jason Todd sees dead people. It's not that big of a deal.


There aren't a lot of perks to being a living, breathing, corpse.

Jason Todd has no legal documents, which makes getting a job awkward, an autopsy scar which makes dating really awkward, and a goddamn grave, which makes family gatherings the most awkward thing _ever_.

Jason honestly doesn't even notice them for a while. He just assumes that they're... really loud civilians, or even weirder hallucinations.

But eventually, Jason figures it out when he tries to punch one particularly irritating one, passes through them, and then finds their body around the corner.

He sees dead people.

Fuck you, M. Night Shyamalan.

* * *

"Oh dear," a ghost says. "You've really done it this time, haven't you?"

"Ah, fuck off," Jason says, lying on the street face down, concussed and bleeding. "Nobody asked you."

The ghost, translucent and blue, gapes at him. She's in her early teens, with scraggly brown hair and bad acne. Jason knows her name because he saw the Amber Alert go out last week—it's Olive Lee. He knows she's dead because he and Batgirl just found her body, prompting her to call the cops and Jason to charge after her killers, which is what lead him to lying on the ground with a bloody mouth and a concussion.

"You can see me?" Olive asks, her voice trembling.

"Yeah," Jason says, forcing himself to his feet. The bad guys are unconscious, taken down before Jason finally allowed himself to collapse. "I'm sorry," he adds, softly. "I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner."

Olive looks only a year or so older than he'd been when he was dead. It's not fair, and they both know it.

"Why?" She asks, reaching out as if trying to touch him. Jason stays absolutely still. He can feel the faintest brush of fingertips, cold like ice, against his cheeks, but when she presses forward, her fingers pass through him, and Jason has to stop himself from shivering.

"I died, once," Jason says. He reaches out himself, focusing on her and only her, trying to see her as solid and real, rather than as the nearly invisible figure. He wraps his fingers around her wrist, the only form of comfort he's ever managed to give to the dead. "When I came back, I can see people like you. I help, when I can."

"What… what do I do?" Olive wraps translucent arms around herself, pulling out of Jason's grip easily, staring at him with large eyes. She looks over her shoulder, at the unconscious forms of her killers, then back to Jason.

"You… you can move on," Jason says, choosing each word carefully.

She tilts her head to one side, her eyes far too brilliant and bright. "Did you?"

Jason shrugs. "I don't remember. But, if you stay, you mostly get to deal with these yokels." He gestures over his shoulder, where his normal crew of ghosts has been lurking, silent while he deals with a new ghost.

"Rude, isn't he?"

Cynthia died a while ago. She's a grandmotherly figure who's told Jason she's not moving on until her ex-husband does so she can give him a piece of her mind.

"Don't mind Jason," advises Marisol, a twenty-five year old ghost with long, dark hair. She'd apparently decided to not move on until they shut down the Mafia Restaurant which gave her fatal food poisoning gets shut down by the health department, and considered the fact that she had died twenty years ago to be irrelevant. "He's always like this."

"Do you have anyone you want to say goodbye to?" Chris was a dad once, and he's staying until his youngest daughter graduates from college. He tends to fuss over young ghosts, when he's not busy attending his kid's various ceremonies and accomplishments.

Olive looks at them all, then shakes her head slowly. "What… what happens next?"

"Find your door," Jason says. "Then you go through it… and you see what happens next."

Chris puts a hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to decide now," he says. "But you can if you want."

She smiles at them all, soft and sad.

Taking a step back, she starts to glow brightly. Jason looks away, and goes to check on the men who killed her, while his nightly ghosts continue to hover and offer unhelpful advice.

"Hood, you over here?" Batgirl calls, her voice rising over Cynthia's commentary about how Jason had probably broken one of the men's arms.

"Yes," he says. Brown walks forward, her eyes narrowing, as they pass over his ghosts. For a moment, he wonders if she can see them, but he dismisses it.

* * *

"You should trim your hair, young man," a ghost wearing a heavy shawl and carrying a fan says.

"No," Jason says. He's finally given up on dying out the streak of white in his hair, but to cut his hair at this point in the process would make it look weird.

She frowns at him. "You look like a hooligan."

"So I'm told," Jason says. He marks his page with his finger, and then finally gives the ghost his full attention. "What's your name?"

She's an older than usual ghost. She's white, not blue, and the edges of her form are faded. The features of her face are nearly sunken into her face, giving her a strange look that Jason usually associates with ghosts who have been trapped in one place for too long.

The woman frowns, her entire existence flickering. "I'm… not sure," she says.

Jason sighs. "Should I call you Augusta or Catherine?"

The woman sits down across from him. "Augusta," she says, determined, keeping her chin high.

Jason nods, setting aside his copy of Oscar Wild. "How can I help you? _Besides_ getting a haircut," he adds.

Her eyes bunch up at the joke. If she hadn't been around so long she'd forgotten her own name, Jason honestly would have laughed. But there's always something sad and lonely about ghosts like this, and he always feels bad for them, even fussy ones like her.

She looks as if she's not sure if he's making fun of her or not. To be fair, he kind of is. Several years of dealing with ghosts have resulted in him needing to use a lot of sarcasm, mockery and morbid humor.

Given how many times he's been possessed or even just nearly possessed by some of his Greek Chorus, he thinks he's earned the right to be kind of a jerk.

In the end, she's a pretty easy case. All she wants is for him to leave some flowers on her grave, and once he promises to do that, she vanishes out of existence, nice and easy.

"Look how easy that is, Casper," Jason says to the five-year-old who has stubbornly refused to move on for the past six weeks. He's been dead for fifty years, and even though Jason knows his real name, he's not about to call a toddler "Reginald." That's a horrible name, and his mother should be ashamed. "Why can't you be like that?"

"Your hair is stupid," Reginald-slash-Casper-the-spoiled-ghost declares. "You should cut it."

"Not you too," Jason scowls down at the kid. "Why are all the ghosts in my life criticizing my life choices?"

"Because you make horrible ones," Marisol says. She's sitting on his kitchen table, reading his junk mail with an air of supreme boredom.

"No one asked you, Elvira! Where's Ruth?"

"If you mean Cynthia, she's haunting her ex-husband again. The guy didn't visit her grave for her birthday. And does that make you Madame Arcati?"

Jason squints at her suspiciously. "Have you been reading over my shoulder again?"

"It's not like I've got anything better to do!" Marisol is trying to turn over the envelope on the table to no avail. Some of the ghosts are better at moving physical objects than others, but Marisol kind of stinks at it.

Chris walks in the door, looking pleased in a way which probably meant his daughter won whatever award she was up for today. "One of your brothers is on his way, Jason," he says.

"Rooftops or on street level?" Jason says.

"Street level. It's the one who needs a haircut even more than you do."

" _Fine_ , I'll cut my hair!" Jason yells, and of course that's when Tim walks in.

"Who are you talking to?" Tim asks, his eyes far too sharp.

"A pain in my ass," Jason says. "What do you want? I'd point out you're supposed to knock but you've known Bruce too long for that to be effective."

Tim's eyes scan the apartment, but unlike Steph, his eyes don't linger over Marisol or Chris. "I was wondering if you were coming to Alfred's birthday party," Tim says, the model of politeness, even though there's a definite furrow between his eyebrows that means he _knows_ something is up, but he can't figure out what.

It's actually pretty hilarious, so Jason decides not to come clean about the ghosts just yet. Yes, he probably _should,_ especially since the ghosts are getting better about coming to him with cases, but he really doesn't want to go through the whole process of explaining shit.

"Sure," he says, flipping on the TV for Marisol. "That's in an hour right? Did you bring your bike, or did you walk?"

"I walked," Tim says, staring at the television. "Why did you turn that on?"

"Elvira will just turn it on anyways," Jason says, safe in the knowledge that Tim has absolutely never read a Noel Coward play in his life and won't catch that reference. "Might as well make it easy for her." He grabs his jacket. "So do you want a ride or what?"

Jason can _see_ the wheels turning in Tim's mind as he tries to translate what Jason says—probably he's going to be running background checks on all of Jason's neighbors to see if any of them are named "Elvira."

"A ride would be great," Tim says, cautiously. Behind him, Marisol is settling into the couch with a huge smile on her face as her favorite telenovela starts. Jason's honestly sad he's going to be missing it, but that's why he has DVR and steals Dick's Netflix. He can catch up later.

"Don't forget about the haircut!" Chris calls, and Jason can't help but make a face before he closes the door behind him.

* * *

Jason doesn't like talking about the time he got possessed, okay?

Pea-soup isn't the _half_ of it, and John Constantine is a _pain_ to deal with, even if he is pretty handy with an exorcism.

He does keep the guy's number close on hand.

Just in case.

* * *

"Fatso, Stinkie, and Stretch, fuck off!" Jason yells at a trio of guys who he's _pretty sure_ are Prohibition-era bootleggers who have taken to following him around when he's in downtown.

He and Batgirl are on patrol in a downtown area, and the three goons have been following them around for the past half hour, including some pretty damn gross shit about Batgirl. He's honestly pretty pissed about it, because he can't exactly _shoot_ ghostly cat-callers, and he left his salt-shaker in his other jacket.

"Hood, who the fuck are you talking to?" Batgirl yells back.

"I see dead people!" Jason snaps, hoping the reference throws her off.

But whoops, he forgot Batgirl is _kind of_ sensitive to that sort of thing.

She stops where she stands, and she's looking _right at the ghosts_. Which she, as someone who hasn't actually died, _shouldn't be able to do_.

… oh wait, she did kind of die that one time, didn't she?

Whoops.

"Huh." She says. "I guess that explains more than it doesn't."

The three ghosts look at each other, and then, quite sensibly, scram before Jason can actually explain to Stephanie Brown their, frankly, very rude comments.

"What do you mean by that?" Jason demands, frowning at the blonde.

"You're fucking _weird_ , Jason." She crossed her arms, and then added, almost as an afterthought, "Also, Dick said you were yelling at Monster High characters over the comms yesterday."

"Wait…" Jason says. "He caught that reference?"

"Honestly, I'm just surprised you went there before you went to _A Christmas Carol_."

"Oh, I used all those names ages ago."

"Of course you did. Well c'mon, Ghostbuster. We've got people to save."

Jason frowns at her, wondering about her blasé reaction, until she pulls out her grappling gun at the same time as he does.

"Just don't cross the streams!" She yells, as the two of them fire their grapples in unison.

Jason groans.

The ghosts laugh.

* * *

 **A/N: References list!**

 **M. Night Shyamalan's "Sixth Sense" - title, "I See Dead People," and he gets to be name-dropped. I guess Jason, like me, holds a grudge about the Last Airbender.**

 **The bit about "Moving On" is a combination of how ghosts work from "Being Human" (UK version, I guess, I've only seen season 1 of that version), along with the ghostly pigeons in Tamora Pierce's Beka Cooper series.**

 **Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - "Catherine (de Bourgh)" & Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest - "Augusta (Bracknell)". Jason's a literary nerd, and he calls a fussy old matriarch when he sees one.**

 **Casper the Friendly Ghost - Casper, along with Fatso, Stinky, and Stretch. Honestly, I've never seen this movie, but it's directly in the tumblr post, and it's an easy shot.**

 **Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit - Elvira is the dead wife of the main character, who accidentally kills his second wife, and they both haunt him. Madame Arcati is the medium who accidentally causes them to manifest.**

 **Ghostbusters - Honestly, a Ghostbuster's quote was nearly the title, but I was way too found of the Sixth Sense joke. So I figured we'd close out on a Ghostbuster's joke instead.**


End file.
